EPTWCS 2014 - Hybrid System Possible? - Page 7
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Feartheguru
Canada1334 Posts
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Prog455
Denmark970 Posts
On August 24 2013 05:07 mvdunecats wrote: How many aspiring professional SC2 players from NA have retired from SC2 in order to play LoL or DotA2? I can really only think of Destiny, but he's more of an outlier in that he is more of an entertainer than a competitor. If SC2 players from NA feel that they don't have a shot at making a living with SC2 and turn to things outside of eSports, then no format change to WCS NA can overcome that, because it's a more general problem with eSports in NA. It is not only a matter of how many people who have retired from SC2 in order to play Dota or LoL. What really matters is how many people who didn't even try to go pro in SC2 because LoL or Dota is easier. Easier in terms of supporting yourself as a progamer that is. | ||
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Chiropractor
United States5 Posts
Foreigners could do well if they did this, just not too many people are willing to take the risk. The system should not be changed just because a region is weaker. The best players should be at every tournament. | ||
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FetusThrower
United States50 Posts
-Doesn't allow growth within weaker scenes -Doesn't allow talent from other countries to come out (i.e. korean scene suffocation) -Causes crazily imba season finals (practically walkovers) Region lock helps because.. -Fosters scene growth independently within the region -Helps provide better sustainability in terms of pros' bills, more time to dedicate to playing What SC2 needs to survive: -Good players -Good games -Good finals -Great season finals -Amazing global finals What SC2 needs to grow: -More funding (i.e. bigger audience) -More tournaments in ALL regions -More benefits to interest players to make SC2 a career -Less oversaturation of titanic, singular events (i.e. 3.5? month-long seasons of WCS, broadcasted nearly every week all week) Region lock prevents 97% of anything good happening as of now. There's not enough talent, and region lock doesn't help with that. Integration of the better players with some of the worse is how people get good enough to be entertaining, not preventing the better players from beating any half-assed NA/EU/Oceania gm so the worse players actually can get paid for less skill. SC2 needs a stronger audience, more tournaments for lower-tier players to play in for EVERY region, and the ability to match worse players against better players so that we do see that skill growth from people who want to dedicate their lives to SC2 for money. Most importantly, SC2 needs way more money. Maybe 2M total prize money worldwide total every year isn't enough when it's all in big tournaments that only the successful pros get to, qualify for and dominate in. Hell, Go4SC2 is basically the only lower tier tournament I can think of and you have players like Pro7ecT, Nerchio, Strelok, San, etc. playing in it pretty much every time.. That's kinda crazy, considering it's like a $200 tournament... I want to say more but can't think of anything else atm, but that's the gist of region locking of any form. The 'mix' you proposed is such a bad idea. E: Props to the post above me, I've tried telling many people the same thing.. | ||
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Op
73 Posts
If we all would want to see the best games, then why not have one big tournament in Korea (like GSL before) ? Or have all 3 tournaments in Korea so the best players can participate and qualify for the finals ? BTW: love the discussions, some very interesting points, especially having 'x' spots for non-resident players, and the team-based region seem quite interesting | ||
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Op
73 Posts
The solution would be to have these players play in the Korean WCS as well. We could encourage this by increasing the prize pool for WCS Korea: the prize money of what-used-to-be-GSL + whatever Blizzard adds to the current WCS Korea prize money. WCS EU and NA could then be (partially) region-locked, with maybe less high-level play but interesting story lines, local players to cheer for, and providing the necessary money for the local scenes to develop themselves. Korean players who would want to participate in EU or NA would have to live there or there could be a requirement on the number of ladder games played on the local server, a limited-spots qualifier or something like this (goal here is to have them practice in the region, so they help local players improve). People who would only want to watch the best games with the best players, would then avoid EU and NA and only watch the WCS KR (and the finals). The WCS finals could then have representation based on the results of the previous finals, so for example 10 spots for players from WCS Korean, 3 from EU and 3 from NA. This might also encourage Korean players to play in WCS Korea because there are more spots for the finals.When players from for example NA would do better during the finals, then they would earn additional spots for the next finals. In summary, a combination of many things already proposed by others in previous posts. | ||
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Sherlock117
United States40 Posts
I think the WCS is pretty good actually, but with a few tweaks a lot more can be accomplished. One problem with WCS I've heard Xenocider mention is that right now there are basically 3 opportunities in a year for up-and-comers to make a name for themselves in the WCS qualifiers. Is it worth it for an up-and-comer to devote 30+ hours a week for a very small chance to qualify and maybe win $100 once every couple months? Some of the biggest problem with the current WCS system I see are: 1. Suffocation by Korean pros 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name 3. Prize money not properly scaling 4. WCS points not properly scaling I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point. So now I would like to explain what I mean by each of these problems and propose some solutions. Maybe these aren't perfect solutions, but I hope you think about them and maybe tweak them a little bit yourself to make them even better. 1. Suffocation by Korean pros This one is pretty obvious. WCS America is just another region for Koreans to compete, albeit mostly Koreans who are popular in the American scene. How can we get people to be interested in watching WCS America? What would make people want to tune in? Personally, I find myself making sure to tune in when it is one of my favorite players playing an important match, and my favorite players are either popular Koreans or Europeans who play my race Terran (so Polt, Taeja, Lucifron, Happy) or almost ANY American player (Scarlett, ViBe, HuK, etc.). In the WCS Season 2 Global Finals the player I cared about most was Scarlett, followed by Polt and Naniwa. I did whatever I could to make sure I would be able to watch the Scarlett vs Bomber quarterfinal. This match was an very important (and competitive) match involving a player I cared about. So to summarize, an all-korean WCS America is boring, and a region locked WCS America would be lame to watch. Let's make it something we want to watch! How do we do this? 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name Again, as it stands right now, the motivation for an up-and-comer to devote 30 hours a week for several months of intensive training is to try his hand at the WCS qualifiers 3 times a year and maybe, maaaaaaaybe get a spot in premier league. This is the problem people have been talking about in this thread and some people aren't understanding. Yes, the American players just aren't as good as Koreans in general, but the main issue is there is little motivation for Americans to become good right now. In order to increase motivation there needs to be a good scaling of goals (different levels of prize money) which are obtainable for local up-and-comers at the lower levels. 3. Prize money not properly scaling The way I see WCS currently, if you qualify for WCS challenger league, great! That's a step in the right direction. But you win absolutely no money unless you qualify for premier league. If you do, you either get $100, $200, or $300 depending on which slot you qualified through (bracket stage, group stage 1st place, or group stage 2nd place). But wait, if you do qualify, you get an additional $1500 next season by playing in premier league. So as a challenger league player you should actually look at it as I either make nada, nothing, zilch, or I make $1600-$1800. In my opinion, that gap is the biggest single issue with WCS not creating opportunities for the up and coming players. Then, there is no difference between 25-32 and 17-24 in premier league and only a very small difference between that and 9-16. 4. Points not properly scaling The issue is exactly the same as the issue above. Non-qualifying players get 25 points, qualifying players get either 150 or 200. That's too big a gap and the 25 points are basically worthless. But there is another, more important issue with ranking points. At this point, the rankings are essentially only worhwhile to people trying to qualify for the year end finals. I'm fine with that for now, though it is something to improve in the future. Blizzard wanted to make sure to not completely stifle other tournaments and throw out some points for other tournaments satisfying certain requirements. But the way I see it, the only qualifyers for the year end finals (the only thing the rankings are good for right now) will be those who made it to season finals at least twice, or placed in the top 2 at one of the season finals. Essentially nothing else matters. So instead of rewarding consistent performance and determining who the best player is, the rankings reward the players who perform well over a 3 day period. A few examples: A consistent player who finishes 9th-16th in a couple WCS seasons and maybe just couldn't push through in a 3rd season and finishes 6th place, while winning several non-WCS tournaments (maybe an IEM and an MLG) should be considered a possible candidate for being in the top 16 players in the world. This person would have something like 2600 points and probably finish the year ranked 25-30. A player who does absolutely nothing in non-WCS tournaments, only qualifies for one WCS season, scrapes by in 5th place, and then somehow miraculously wins the global finals ends up with 3500 points and something like 10th-15th. The biggest issue to me is that finishing 6th in a season gets you 500 points, while finishing 5th gets you 1000 points, and finishing 4th gets you 1250 points. That's just a wonky point scale and needs to be tweaked. Or somebody like Naniwa has some really solid results in WCS and out and is in the running for the year-end-finals, but then has one bad day by dropping to challenger league in the round of 32 and now has 0 chance of making it. Why? His only hope at this point would be to win at least 1 Tier I non-WCS tournament and one or two Tier II tournaments. Solutions? I said I would come at this with a view of how tennis works, because I think Starcraft would succeed very much if they tweaked some things in the way they are done with tennis. 4. Point scaling Point scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis. Possibly reduce the WCS seasons so the winner gets 1000 and so on appropriately as these tournaments are more money winners for the players and exclusive qualifiers for season finals. Right now there is too much double-dipping of points each season within WCS tournaments making non-WCS tournaments irrelevant. Tier II tournaments could be either 750 or 1000 depending on prize money, again with more spots getting points lower down. A new Tier III tournament tier could be added awarding somewhere between 200-500 points to the winner depending on prize money. These could be region locked tournaments. 3. Money scaling Another easy fix without the answer being "More money!". Change the money for premier league to: 25-32: $750 17-24: $1250 13-16: $1750 9-12: $2500 This makes each win in Premier league worthwhile. What else does it do? It frees up an additional $9000 in the prize money that can be used elsewhere! Where? In challenger league and it's qualifiers. This actually doesn't make the 17-32 finishers lose out as much as you think because they will won some more money down in challenger league. It just spreads more money to challenger league players. Changes for the challenger league? Have the bracket stage be about winning the money, have the group stage be about qualifying for premier league or challenger league next season. Bracket winners get $500, runners-up get $300, 3rd place gets $200, and first round losers $100. That only eats up $4800 of the extra money and everyone who qualifies gets paid! What about the rest of the money? Hold off a minute and I'll give you my thought. 2. More opportunities for up-and-comers Increase the number of qualifiers and drop outs each season of wcs to 24 instead of 8, adding an additional round to the bracket stage of challenger league with the winners getting $0 (or maybe $50?). Have qualifiers spread throughout the WCS season, once every few weeks. Some are open to anybody and offer no prize money, only challenger league qualification. Some are region locked and offer some of that $4000 leftover prize money as well as challenger league qualification. Oh, wait! That also solves some of #1, suffocation by Korean pros, while at the same time not region locking!!!! I'm a numbers guy, so I could go into more detail about how the wcs system should work and give exact numbers and all that, but that's not necessary. Try and get the big idea  So please consider this, and maybe offer some tweaks that would make it even better! | ||
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Taipoka
Brazil1224 Posts
On August 28 2013 11:02 Op wrote: Just a weird question: why do we have 3 different WCS tournaments (KR, EU, NA) ? If we all would want to see the best games, then why not have one big tournament in Korea (like GSL before) ? Or have all 3 tournaments in Korea so the best players can participate and qualify for the finals ? BTW: love the discussions, some very interesting points, especially having 'x' spots for non-resident players, and the team-based region seem quite interesting Although i don´t have a formed opinion about region lock, you have a hell of a good point. Just make 3 events like dota TI. | ||
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rd
United States2586 Posts
On August 24 2013 20:40 FetusThrower wrote: Region lock doesn't work because.. -Doesn't allow growth within weaker scenes -Doesn't allow talent from other countries to come out (i.e. korean scene suffocation) -Causes crazily imba season finals (practically walkovers) Koreans flying out to foreign events and stomping foreigners doesn't make foreigners better. They need practice with Koreans, not a couple bo3's before getting rolled. It can offer an incentive to Koreans to move to foreign countries to compete and play on the region's server and practice with their players, which does fuel growth. | ||
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tadL
Croatia679 Posts
I asked my self a simple question. Who would get most profit out of region lock? Well first ofc the rich foreigner Teams: Lets face it. All will get as many willing Koreans as they can in their Region to bring them results. If liquids pros are willing to live in NA for WCS they will fly them all here and let them live there. Same for EG , CoL, Axiom(?), Acer and well thats it right? In EU this would happen too. So I don't think it will help the regional players at all because even mid players destroying foreigners. What if just a few Koreans would come to dominate the Top and some foreigners could make it in: Well this could happen too and what will happen because it happened in all leagues that are region locked and you maybe remember it from MLG in the past. People that are clearly not good enough for a win would stick in it. And because they know they cant win but they are good enough to not get kicked out it will get boring as hell. Trust me, I watched tons of WC3 EPS Germany and it locked all the years the same. You will not see the big upcoming newcomers like you think. If they did not made it till now they will not made it than. They will just leech some "easy safe money" and thats it. You will see lots of players just log in 2 hours pre Game, ladder a bit and then play their games and thats it. Yes some will try to a point and if they don't make it again and again just switch to this leech mode. This would ofc be nice for the mid / low / lazy / not skilled call it how you like players but it will not help the WCS. You would just block better players in the end. What would happen for players: Well first their salaries would rise like hell. You are in the (how is it called,m don't know so I will just call it CodeS) CodeS and you don't get kicked out. Bet you ass you will get a lot of money. If you can show up for an Offline Event you just have the jackpot. Thats all good for them and it does not matter if you will not win and get kicked out in the first round. And than I just thought: What would happen to Teams: Well, Teams that can pay the money will do it and lets say a Team like Root and others will get a better Sponsor deal if they get a player in the CodeS or a Offline Show. This is good but creates problems. The big Team will grab the player and now you have to get a new player that can make it again because if you are not in CodeS / Offline event your sponsor shipment will just pass away. And you don't have the money to compete in first place and you will have a hard time to build up sponsor deals to even get in the top or much harder stay there. And than things get complicated. Players are greedy and they should be but as it get spread out how much the top players are getting people that are not there will have bigger expectations. And yes this happened too where players that are maybe up coming players will ask for so much that you cant or want pay them (xlord..) . You will try as a team because you need the CodeS guys to keep or get sponsors and a bad thing starts. Everything gets more and more expensive. You had this too in the EPS Germany. Teams that are not even qualified for their EPS asked for so much, and in some cases even more than actual EPS players got as payment. This will create later a lot of trouble especially if the league disappears but people don't realize it. But in the end its good for them and so the "upcoming" stars would get a big profit out of it. But it means more control for the Teams: And on the other side Teams could manipulate for their best. You know that player A is stronger than B and if A wins he is in a better spot for the next round or even in the final. So ofc the team will let player A win. Mouz did it in the past too with Hasu letting Spell win so that he can get his save spot for the Finals. And yes the finals sk_Miou vs Mouz_Spell have been fantastic in WC3! Best Human Mirrors ever seen. (btw isnt it interesting that in sc2 and wc3 the only interesting mirror is tvt?) So ofc foreigner Teams want a region lock because they have more control in the end with what will happen. And I am not saying that's bad. If Vettel needs 2 points more to get his next title, bet your ass I would tell Webber that he should let Vettel pass. Think this a bit bigger, Liquid needs the 1 more player in the final or their sponsor deal is gone and goes to lets say Root and give them extra money that they need for the next season if their player looses to this one player. Root cant qualify for the final anyway. And yes such things happened in the past and will happen again. And it will happen in a region locked WCS if it is not happening already. And what if they region lock the hard way: You have to be a citizen of this area? Well basicly the same I mentioned but as there are just 2-6 players that are really trying in each region like it is now. You would have just more easy money leechers and thats it. But if they region lock they have to do it this way. This is ofc not all just the things I instantly thought about. And I think you should too think about why some people are trying to push the region lock as hard as they can. And again I like the idea too because if they call it NA/EU it should be just NA/EU. But I have to admit. The quality of games would not increase. It would be like the WCG since well for ever? You have 1 or maybe 2 foreigner that are able to win it like Grubby did! I love you grubby, and i miss the times when basicly just you and Tod won the WC3L! ps: still working on my english...sry | ||
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Caladan
Germany1238 Posts
Besides this, if Blizzard does not introduce region lock, America sc2 scene is definitely dead. Just dead. | ||
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lemonbone
Hong Kong154 Posts
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Kaitlin
United States2958 Posts
On August 22 2013 17:14 ChosenSC2 wrote: Anything that promotes actually having a NA scene, I'm all for it. As someone who has eat, breathe, sleep SC for like 6 years, it's hard to even care anymore. I don't want to tune in to WCS "America" to watch 32 Koreans go at it.... wtf? Or go to MLG in America to see 85 Koreans get the top 75 spots. I would actually love to watch MLG if the final 4 was like Sheth, ViBE, HuK, SeleCt way more than watching Korean mercenaries who just fly in for 2 days to win money. They have GSL, and if an American wants to play in GSL they can't just fly there for 2 days and win $25,0000.... The best example I can think of is like in Canada, they have a Canadian Football League. It is very possible for a player, coach, manager, employee, organization etc to make a sustainable and comfortable income being a part of it. If in the Canadian Football League every season they just had the Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers come SHIT on everyone and take any money associated with the league do you think it would survive as a League? TL:DR: Until NA players have a reason to be full-time, something to play for, the NA scene will slowly die. Right now there is no reason unless you make money from streaming or other means. Um, I realize I'm a little late to the party, but are you really using the CFL to support your argument ? Are you saying that only Canadians play in the CFL ? I don't follow the CFL, but I've venture a guess that it's filled with football players from all around the world who aren't good enough to play in the NFL or any better leagues, if there are any. So, that is exactly what these Koreans are doing. They are playing in Leagues because they either aren't good enough to win the "best" league or they can simply earn more money in these other leagues. Your analogy sucks. Just because they live in a particular country or are of a particular race, who are you, or anyone, or Blizzard to say they can't compete in a foreign tournament, as long as they are able to meet the requirements. | ||
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StarStruck
25339 Posts
On September 04 2013 11:04 rd wrote: Koreans flying out to foreign events and stomping foreigners doesn't make foreigners better. They need practice with Koreans, not a couple bo3's before getting rolled. It can offer an incentive to Koreans to move to foreign countries to compete and play on the region's server and practice with their players, which does fuel growth. They don't necessarily have to move anywhere to get more games out of them. Similar sentiment to me, but instead I would have them competing in more meaningful games, i.e. an actual circuit instead of once in a blue moon. So we agree on upping the amount of games they play. | ||
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Kaitlin
United States2958 Posts
On August 28 2013 11:18 Op wrote: People who preferred the GSL model or want to watch the best games, would probably be best off by watching the Korean WCS. The only problem is that a lot of the best players (like Taeja, Hero, etc) are playing in WCS NA now. The solution would be to have these players play in the Korean WCS as well. We could encourage this by increasing the prize pool for WCS Korea: the prize money of what-used-to-be-GSL + whatever Blizzard adds to the current WCS Korea prize money. WCS EU and NA could then be (partially) region-locked, with maybe less high-level play but interesting story lines, local players to cheer for, and providing the necessary money for the local scenes to develop themselves. Korean players who would want to participate in EU or NA would have to live there or there could be a requirement on the number of ladder games played on the local server, a limited-spots qualifier or something like this (goal here is to have them practice in the region, so they help local players improve). People who would only want to watch the best games with the best players, would then avoid EU and NA and only watch the WCS KR (and the finals). The WCS finals could then have representation based on the results of the previous finals, so for example 10 spots for players from WCS Korean, 3 from EU and 3 from NA. This might also encourage Korean players to play in WCS Korea because there are more spots for the finals.When players from for example NA would do better during the finals, then they would earn additional spots for the next finals. In summary, a combination of many things already proposed by others in previous posts. What a warped community. Tournaments are about the best game play. What kind of a joke organization would go out of its way to deliberately drop the quality of game play comprising two-thirds of its product ? If people want to watch their favorites play sub-optimally, they can watch their streams and subscribe to support them. | ||
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Taipoka
Brazil1224 Posts
On September 04 2013 09:08 Sherlock117 wrote: ... I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point. ... Point scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis. I would say that i disagree at all. :D But i´ll just put a pint as you asked for a tweak. You failed to consider one thing about SC2, and that is what i allways said KeSPA did right and GOM did wrong. SC2 tounaments are focused on players, like you want (Like tennis), but you don´t have a structure like tennis. Why? Because on tennis, the players are the team. A player win money from prizes, sponsors, comercials, etc, and the player pay a salary for his coach, nutricionist, medic, etc. On SC2, a player win money from tournament, but he is part of a team with coach etc. And this team must find sponsors to pay for the house, coaches, food, and maybe a salary. Saw what is wrong? Where is the exposure to the sponsors????????????? Because you see Liquid Taeja winning championships... not <put sponsor name> Liquid Taeja, but the sponsor is paying for all the liquid team, not only Taeja. I think there are 3 alternatives to SC2: 1) Be like tennis. ie, close the teams and play like ATP circuit with the players paying for coach, house, etc. 2) Be like KeSPA and focus on teams, ie, focus on sponsors. 3) Be like the only one entity who made this SC2 scene right (I dont like em, but i must recognise they are good on this). Do like EG. Don´t focus on be the best and win champioships. Focus on be a enterntainer. This gives your sponsors the visibility needed. But. Are there space for that much entertainers? Let put 200~400 only on korea? | ||
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vthree
Hong Kong8039 Posts
On September 04 2013 09:08 Sherlock117 wrote: First of all, sorry for the long post. I've been thinking long and hard about how the system works and have some thoughts that I want to explain. But to really explain things requires some words! I think the WCS is pretty good actually, but with a few tweaks a lot more can be accomplished. One problem with WCS I've heard Xenocider mention is that right now there are basically 3 opportunities in a year for up-and-comers to make a name for themselves in the WCS qualifiers. Is it worth it for an up-and-comer to devote 30+ hours a week for a very small chance to qualify and maybe win $100 once every couple months? Some of the biggest problem with the current WCS system I see are: 1. Suffocation by Korean pros 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name 3. Prize money not properly scaling 4. WCS points not properly scaling I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point. So now I would like to explain what I mean by each of these problems and propose some solutions. Maybe these aren't perfect solutions, but I hope you think about them and maybe tweak them a little bit yourself to make them even better. 1. Suffocation by Korean pros This one is pretty obvious. WCS America is just another region for Koreans to compete, albeit mostly Koreans who are popular in the American scene. How can we get people to be interested in watching WCS America? What would make people want to tune in? Personally, I find myself making sure to tune in when it is one of my favorite players playing an important match, and my favorite players are either popular Koreans or Europeans who play my race Terran (so Polt, Taeja, Lucifron, Happy) or almost ANY American player (Scarlett, ViBe, HuK, etc.). In the WCS Season 2 Global Finals the player I cared about most was Scarlett, followed by Polt and Naniwa. I did whatever I could to make sure I would be able to watch the Scarlett vs Bomber quarterfinal. This match was an very important (and competitive) match involving a player I cared about. So to summarize, an all-korean WCS America is boring, and a region locked WCS America would be lame to watch. Let's make it something we want to watch! How do we do this? 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name Again, as it stands right now, the motivation for an up-and-comer to devote 30 hours a week for several months of intensive training is to try his hand at the WCS qualifiers 3 times a year and maybe, maaaaaaaybe get a spot in premier league. This is the problem people have been talking about in this thread and some people aren't understanding. Yes, the American players just aren't as good as Koreans in general, but the main issue is there is little motivation for Americans to become good right now. In order to increase motivation there needs to be a good scaling of goals (different levels of prize money) which are obtainable for local up-and-comers at the lower levels. 3. Prize money not properly scaling The way I see WCS currently, if you qualify for WCS challenger league, great! That's a step in the right direction. But you win absolutely no money unless you qualify for premier league. If you do, you either get $100, $200, or $300 depending on which slot you qualified through (bracket stage, group stage 1st place, or group stage 2nd place). But wait, if you do qualify, you get an additional $1500 next season by playing in premier league. So as a challenger league player you should actually look at it as I either make nada, nothing, zilch, or I make $1600-$1800. In my opinion, that gap is the biggest single issue with WCS not creating opportunities for the up and coming players. Then, there is no difference between 25-32 and 17-24 in premier league and only a very small difference between that and 9-16. 4. Points not properly scaling The issue is exactly the same as the issue above. Non-qualifying players get 25 points, qualifying players get either 150 or 200. That's too big a gap and the 25 points are basically worthless. But there is another, more important issue with ranking points. At this point, the rankings are essentially only worhwhile to people trying to qualify for the year end finals. I'm fine with that for now, though it is something to improve in the future. Blizzard wanted to make sure to not completely stifle other tournaments and throw out some points for other tournaments satisfying certain requirements. But the way I see it, the only qualifyers for the year end finals (the only thing the rankings are good for right now) will be those who made it to season finals at least twice, or placed in the top 2 at one of the season finals. Essentially nothing else matters. So instead of rewarding consistent performance and determining who the best player is, the rankings reward the players who perform well over a 3 day period. A few examples: A consistent player who finishes 9th-16th in a couple WCS seasons and maybe just couldn't push through in a 3rd season and finishes 6th place, while winning several non-WCS tournaments (maybe an IEM and an MLG) should be considered a possible candidate for being in the top 16 players in the world. This person would have something like 2600 points and probably finish the year ranked 25-30. A player who does absolutely nothing in non-WCS tournaments, only qualifies for one WCS season, scrapes by in 5th place, and then somehow miraculously wins the global finals ends up with 3500 points and something like 10th-15th. The biggest issue to me is that finishing 6th in a season gets you 500 points, while finishing 5th gets you 1000 points, and finishing 4th gets you 1250 points. That's just a wonky point scale and needs to be tweaked. Or somebody like Naniwa has some really solid results in WCS and out and is in the running for the year-end-finals, but then has one bad day by dropping to challenger league in the round of 32 and now has 0 chance of making it. Why? His only hope at this point would be to win at least 1 Tier I non-WCS tournament and one or two Tier II tournaments. Solutions? I said I would come at this with a view of how tennis works, because I think Starcraft would succeed very much if they tweaked some things in the way they are done with tennis. 4. Point scaling Point scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis. Possibly reduce the WCS seasons so the winner gets 1000 and so on appropriately as these tournaments are more money winners for the players and exclusive qualifiers for season finals. Right now there is too much double-dipping of points each season within WCS tournaments making non-WCS tournaments irrelevant. Tier II tournaments could be either 750 or 1000 depending on prize money, again with more spots getting points lower down. A new Tier III tournament tier could be added awarding somewhere between 200-500 points to the winner depending on prize money. These could be region locked tournaments. 3. Money scaling Another easy fix without the answer being "More money!". Change the money for premier league to: 25-32: $750 17-24: $1250 13-16: $1750 9-12: $2500 This makes each win in Premier league worthwhile. What else does it do? It frees up an additional $9000 in the prize money that can be used elsewhere! Where? In challenger league and it's qualifiers. This actually doesn't make the 17-32 finishers lose out as much as you think because they will won some more money down in challenger league. It just spreads more money to challenger league players. Changes for the challenger league? Have the bracket stage be about winning the money, have the group stage be about qualifying for premier league or challenger league next season. Bracket winners get $500, runners-up get $300, 3rd place gets $200, and first round losers $100. That only eats up $4800 of the extra money and everyone who qualifies gets paid! What about the rest of the money? Hold off a minute and I'll give you my thought. 2. More opportunities for up-and-comers Increase the number of qualifiers and drop outs each season of wcs to 24 instead of 8, adding an additional round to the bracket stage of challenger league with the winners getting $0 (or maybe $50?). Have qualifiers spread throughout the WCS season, once every few weeks. Some are open to anybody and offer no prize money, only challenger league qualification. Some are region locked and offer some of that $4000 leftover prize money as well as challenger league qualification. Oh, wait! That also solves some of #1, suffocation by Korean pros, while at the same time not region locking!!!! I'm a numbers guy, so I could go into more detail about how the wcs system should work and give exact numbers and all that, but that's not necessary. Try and get the big idea So please consider this, and maybe offer some tweaks that would make it even better! Although I agree with the many of these points. I just want to point out the issue with points scaling (more points for non-WCS events). Unlike tennis where most of the top 50 pros can attend most of the tournaments. This is not the case for non-WCS events like MLG, Dreamhack, etc. Sure, some tournaments have qualifiers. But it still doesn't take away the fact that the EG, TL, players (and HyuN) just gets a lot more opportunity to attend foreign events. | ||
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Taipoka
Brazil1224 Posts
On September 04 2013 13:09 vthree wrote: Although I agree with the many of these points. I just want to point out the issue with points scaling (more points for non-WCS events). Unlike tennis where most of the top 50 pros can attend most of the tournaments. This is not the case for non-WCS events like MLG, Dreamhack, etc. Sure, some tournaments have qualifiers. But it still doesn't take away the fact that the EG, TL, players (and HyuN) just gets a lot more opportunity to attend foreign events. Because you have tounaments for the players, but in SC2 you don´t have players, you have teams. And on tennis, you have players, and tounaments for the players. And that don´t get even on the end, its a hybrid monster. | ||
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dangthatsright
1158 Posts
On September 04 2013 12:45 Kaitlin wrote: What a warped community. Tournaments are about the best game play. What kind of a joke organization would go out of its way to deliberately drop the quality of game play comprising two-thirds of its product ? If people want to watch their favorites play sub-optimally, they can watch their streams and subscribe to support them. How would those favorites get in that position in the first place? When you have a bunch of "faceless Koreans", who aren't magically so much better that they're more interesting to watch, getting into challenger league instead (one even dropping out without playing any games), it doesn't really help the issue much. | ||
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Nerski
United States1095 Posts
The issue isn't will WCS become more region based, it's by the time that it does will the scene in the EU/NA still be healthy. That's why you see people who are pro's in those scenes be proponents of region locks. It's not because they 'need' it to be truly locked, they just need the people playing in the scene to be invested in it. | ||
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